It was an enormous hollowing of the earth consisting of three behemoth pits, each of which was several hundred meters in diameter. Heavy-duty excavators drove along the terraced edges of the craters like little yellow ants. Next to the pits, there was a mineral-processing facility with numerous chemical storage vats and rectangular pools of water. Toxic waste from the processing plant was discarded into a large, square-shaped depository roughly one square kilometer in size. The entire complex was more than ten square kilometers,
